Complaint amendment filed in ICE suit
5th December 2022 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
Several civil rights and immigrant legal representation groups have filed an amended complaint in federal court adding allegations to a lawsuit against the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in Louisiana for allegedly denying migrants’ legal access to attorneys.
The added documentation, filed Nov. 18, amends the lawsuit against ICE in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia filed in October concerning violations of immigrants’ civil rights at four federal detention centers across the country, including one in Ferriday, La.
The original lawsuit was filed on behalf of detained immigrants by the ACLU and numerous other organizations charging that ICE officials have illegally and severely limited communications between detainees and their legal representation. The suit alleges systemic and widespread violations of the rights of detained immigrants, many of whom are indigent and/or geographically separated from legal representation by far distances.
The Nov. 18 amendments to the original legal action include new examples of illegal actions by ICE officials denying detainees’ access to and communication with legal representation; declarations by several plaintiffs’ attorneys detailing the difficulties they’ve had communicating with detainees and the harms done to immigrants as a result; and declarations from other figures, including lawyers and neighboring jails and prisons, as well as a psychiatrist and correctional mental-health specialist.
The amended complaints also request an injunction by the court to guarantee that several steps are taken by ICE officials to provide adequate, effective communications between detainees and legal assistance at the four named ICE detention centers.
Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, said such steps include “allowing things like scheduled, confidential, private and free telephone and video calls (like Zoom) between attorneys and their detained clients; private and confidential meeting rooms; access to interpreters; and the ability for attorneys to bring laptops and cell phones into in-person meetings.”
Cho added that “without this preliminary relief, [detainees] will continue to suffer ‘irreparable harm.’ The restrictions that are placed on attorney access at these facilities have caused unnecessary and prolonged detention of people, in dangerous conditions of confinement.” She said that the illegal restrictions have inhibited immigrants’ ability to relate information about abuse they are suffering at ICE facilities.
“Legal aid organizations are not able to fulfill their missions of providing services to people in detention,” Cho said. “Detained people’s constitutional rights will continue to be violated, without the court’s intervention.”
Cho said that it continues to be extremely difficult to document and assess the exact scope of such violations of civil rights at ICE facilities because ICE does a poor job at documenting examples of the denial of legal representation and communication, a chronic, systemic problem that has been detailed in a recent ACLU report titled, “No Righting Chance: ICE’s Denial of Access to Counsel in U.S. Immigration Detention Centers.”
“Denial of access to counsel in ICE detention is unfortunately a nationwide problem,” Cho said. “We’ve heard reports from legal advocates around the country for years that access to counsel in ICE detention is a huge impediment to their work.”
She added that “ICE does not do a very good job of tracking this problem itself. It doesn’t conduct inspections on this issue, and even admitted to Congress earlier this year that it doesn’t keep track of violations related to attorney access.”
A spokesperson for ICE said that because ICE doesn’t comment on pending litigation, the agency cannot comment further on either the original lawsuit or the new amendments to the complaint.
An agency representative had earlier pointed out to The Louisiana Weekly that ICE does have extensive, established policies and guidelines for ICE officials to follow in regard to allowing detainees’ access to representation through numerous means. The spokesperson had said all ICE representatives are fully aware of those guidelines and that immigration officials know they are required to follow those guidelines. The subject of the restriction and denial of immigrant detainees’ access to legal representation have reached the halls of power in Washington. Last month, 28 members of Congress wrote a letter to U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and ICE acting director Tae D. Johnson to relate the Congressmembers’ deep concerns over such civil rights violations at immigration facilities.
“ICE’s failure to provide meaningful language access…exacerbates the structural issues that detained immigrants face in communicating with others and exercising their legal rights,” the congressional letter stated.
The letter added that “ICE has failed as an agency to exercise even the most basic oversight or data collection regarding immigrants’ access to counsel in detention.”
This article originally published in the December 5, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
